Spotinst Helps to Reduce Amazon EC2 Costs Up to 80%

This post is part of the Startups on Air series. Startup Evangelist Mackenzie Kosut visits different startups and learns who they are, what they do, and how they use AWS.

Spotinst is an Israeli startup that was founded 18 months ago by four veterans of MAMRAM (the elite Infrastructure Technology unit of the Israel Defense Forces). The initial idea for Spotinst came from the current CEO, Amiram Shachar, who had been working on a big cloud migration project. During the migration, Shachar experienced firsthand the high costs of running gigantic compute clusters on AWS. He saw a future where Spot Instances could be leveraged to solve the problem. To bring this vision to fruition, the Spotinst team developed software that adds a predictability layer to the Spot Market. They did this by creating technology that uses an understanding of an application’s state in order to reliably run it on Spot Instances. Today, Spotinst has more than 40 employees in both Tel Aviv and San Francisco, and they continue to grow. Currently, Spotinst manages over 1,000 AWS accounts that collectively have many thousands of EC2 instances.

Spotinst built a SaaS platform that provides intelligent workload management, allowing Spotinst’s customers to save 50–80% of their EC2 spend while maintaining 100% availability for customers’ applications. They achieve through a set of heuristics and prediction algorithms that determine the most suitable EC2 instance types on which to place Spot bids. To make predictions, these heuristics and algorithms combine historical statistics and real-time analytics about various EC2 resource pools.

There are many use cases for Spotinst: web services and applications, including those behind an Elastic Load Balancer; big data clusters (such as Hadoop clusters); containerized environments (including Amazon EC2 Container Service, Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm); and high performance computing (HPC).

Spotinst is a big user of EC2 Container Service (ECS). In particular, Spotinst uses ECS to deploy and run containers in Spotinst’s containerized microservices architecture. Additionally, Spotinst uses Elastic Load Balancing with ECS to manipulate and forward traffic. Spotinst also uses other AWS services such as Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and individual EC2 instances from time to time.

Interested in learning more about Spotinst? Check out their website or twitter page.